I wrote yesterday that the Trump tax plan is yielding significant benefits, but one of my caveats at the end of the column warned that Trump’s weak record on spending undermines the long-run sustainability of lower tax rates.

The latest example of Trump’s profligacy is the $1.4 trillion spending bill for the 2020 fiscal year that was just approved (this is the “discretionary” money for the parts of the budget that are annually appropriated, so keep in mind that there’s also more than $3 trillion of “mandatory” spending for entitlement programs in 2020).

…a giant spending package — 2,313 pages long — that was…negotiated in secret, spends $1.4 trillion, and is chock full of member projects and special-interest giveaways. …more than $4,200 for every man, woman, and child in America. …This package includes $25 million for the “operation, maintenance, and security” of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It includes a $7.25 million increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest increase in a decade. …It includes more than $1 billion in new foreign-aid funding without any discussion about what we’re getting for this funding. …This bill spends $1.4 trillion, with no cuts or reforms. …How many more trillions of dollars do we need to spend before we wake up to the danger…? We need to reform the way Washington works, and we need to do it now.

The Wall Street Journal was similarly dismayed, opining about the bipartisan spending orgy and pointing out the real problem is that all this spending violates the Golden Rule of fiscal policy.

Congress has left town for the year but alas not before another bipartisan spending party that has typified the Trump Presidency. …The budget problem isn’t a shortage of revenue. CBO says tax receipts grew 4% last fiscal year, through September, and 3% in the first two months this year. Economic growth is feeding the Treasury. But spending is growing much faster: 8% last fiscal year, more than four times the inflation rate, and 6% in October and November this year. In addition to the latest discretionary bills, spending on Social Security (6%), Medicare (6.1%) and Medicaid (9.2%) continue to soar this year. Neither party shows any inclination to do anything about those programs, except expand them. Mr. Trump may yet join Barack Obama in the spending record books.

Regarding the final sentence in the above excerpt, I will predict now that Trump will exceed Obama’s profligacy.

Republicans botched the repeal of Obamacare. They’ve already sold out (twice!) on the spending caps in the Budget Control Act, and they’re about to do it again.

And now they want to bring back earmarks.

In this interview with Neil Cavuto, I explain why this is a very troubling development.

One thing I didn’t mention in the interview is that earmarks are inherently corrupt. Indeed, there’s a near-universal four-step process that – in a just world – would result in politicians getting arrested (see 18 U.S. Code § 203) for bribery, graft, and conflicts of interest.

An interest group decides it wants other people’s money and decides to use government as a middleman.

The interest group hires lobbyists, most of whom are former members of Congress or former staff members.

The interest group and the lobbyists direct campaign contributions to one or more politicians.

In exchange for those contributions, one or more earmarks are inserted in a spending bill.

That’s a great deal for Washington insiders, but not so good for taxpayers or honest government.

And if you don’t believe me, read about the oleaginous behavior of Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Jim Moran.

Now let’s consider an argument in favor of earmarks. Writing for Bloomberg, Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University argues that the system needs a bit of grease to work better.

…think of earmarks as local benefits inserted into bills to buy more votes in Congress. …Recalcitrant representatives can be swayed by the promise of a perk for their district. That eases gridlock…whether we like it or not, there is something inherently transactional about being governed.

As I stated in the interview, I don’t think this assertion is persuasive. Most legislation is bad for liberty, so I agree with America’s Founders that gridlock is good.

That being said, Tyler makes a couple of compelling arguments. First, he points out that we may need some pork to get good legislation through the process.

Advocates of smaller government should keep in mind that reforming spending and regulation requires some activism from Congress. Gridlock today is not the friend of fiscal responsibility, coherent policy, or a free, well-functioning capitalist economy.

I agree with the first sentence and said the same thing in my talk with Neil. We will need congressional action to reform entitlements and save the country. And if that means bribing a few members to get votes, so be it.

However, I think his second sentence is too optimistic. Good reform is not very likely with Trump in the White House. It’s a judgement call, to be sure, but I believe gridlock will be a good thing for the next few years.

Second, Tyler acknowledges that politicians try to buy votes, but he suggests that earmarks are cheap compared to potential alternatives (such as new entitlements, presumably).

…virtually every member of Congress looks to support government spending that will boost his or her re-election prospects. It is often the case that directly targeted local spending — which may take the form of earmarks — buys support for a relatively low dollar price per vote. If earmarks are removed, representatives are still going to pursue votes, but the total amount of electorally motivated, wasteful government spending may be higher.

This is a potentially persuasive point, but I’ll be skeptical until I see some supporting evidence.

In a gridlock environment, I suspect enacting non-earmark spending is not that easy (though I admit an Obamacare-level budget buster every 10 years would completely wipe out in just one year the money that might be saved over several decades with an earmark ban).

In addition to what Tyler wrote, another pro-earmark argument is that there will always be a person who decides how money is spent. And I’ve had members of Congress tell me that they’d rather make those decisions that have a bunch of left-wing bureaucrats allocate money.

That’s a perfectly reasonable argument, but it doesn’t address my fundamental concern that the existence of earmarks will seduce members into supporting higher overall levels of spending.

Last month, I explained that America’s fiscal problems are almost entirely the result of domestic spending programs, particularly entitlements.

Some critics immediately decided this meant I favored a blank check for the Pentagon, even though I specifically stated that “I’m very sympathetic to the proposition that trillions of dollars that have been misspent on foreign adventurism this century.”

Moreover, if they bothered to do any research, they would have found numerous columns on Pentagon waste, including here, here, here, here, and here.

Indeed, I get especially upset about military boondoggles precisely because national defense is a legitimate function of government.

I want money being spent in ways that will minimize the threat of an attack on the United States, not on the basis of padding jobs in a particular politician’s hometown or in response to clever lobbying by a defense contractor.

Unfortunately, wasting money is what government does best. And it happens at the Pentagon just as often as elsewhere in the federal behemoth.

Let’s look at a recent exposé about Pentagon profligacy in the Washington Post.

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget… Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results. …Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management. …the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

Here’s a rather sobering chart from the story.

Predictably, bureaucrats in the military tried to cover up evidence of waste and inefficiency.

…some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper. So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

Here’s a final excerpt from the story. The “no one REALLY knows” quote is rather revealing.

“We will never be as efficient as a commercial organization,” Work said. “We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that.” …while the Defense Department was “the world’s largest corporate enterprise,” it had never “rigorously measured” the “cost-effectiveness, speed, agility or quality” of its business operations. Nor did the Pentagon have even a remotely accurate idea of what it was paying for those operations… McKinsey hazarded a guess: anywhere between $75 billion and $100 billion a year, or between 15 and 20 percent of the Pentagon’s annual expenses. “No one REALLY knows,” the memo added. …the average administrative job at the Pentagon was costing taxpayers more than $200,000, including salary and benefits.

Let’s close with some blurbs from other stories.

Starting with some specific examples of waste from a recent story by U.S. News & World Report.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction has uncovered scandal after scandal involving U.S. aid to that country, including the creation of private villas for a small number of personnel working for a Pentagon economic development initiative and a series of costly facilities that were never or barely used. An analysis by ProPublica puts the price tag for wasteful and misguided expenditures in Afghanistan at $17 billion, a figure that is higher than the GDP of 80 nations. …A Politico report on the Pentagon’s $44 billion Defense Logistics Agency notes that it spent over $7 billion on unneeded equipment. …overspending on routine items – such as the Army’s recent expenditure of $8,000 on a gear worth $500 – continues.

Let’s also not forget that the Pentagon is quite capable of being just as incompetent as other bureaucracies.

The USS Fort Worth, a Navy littoral combat ship, has suffered extensive gear damage while docked at a port in Singapore. …According to reports, the crew failed to use sufficient lube oil, leading to excessively high temperatures on the gears. Debris also found its way into the lubrication system, which also contributed to failure, Defense News reports. The crew did not follow standard operating procedures.

An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014, said people familiar with the matter, a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind. …officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia. …“Did someone take a bribe to send it somewhere else? Was it an intelligence operation, or just a series of mistakes? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said one U.S. official. …At some point, officials loading the first flight realized the missile it expected to be loading onto the aircraft wasn’t among the cargo, the government official said. After tracing the cargo, officials realized that the missile had been loaded onto a truck operated by Air France, which took the missile to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. There, it was loaded onto a “mixed pallet” of cargo and placed on an Air France flight. By the time the freight-forwarding firm in Madrid tracked down the missile, it was on the Air France flight, headed to Havana.

And let’s not forget about the jaw-dropping absurdity of an intelligence chief who isn’t allowed to…um…see intelligence.

For more than two years, the Navy’s intelligence chief has been stuck with a major handicap: He’s not allowed to know any secrets. Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel. …More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked. Although the Navy transferred Loveless to a slightly less sensitive post, it kept Branch in charge of its intelligence division. That has resulted in an awkward arrangement, akin to sending a warship into battle with its skipper stuck onshore. …Some critics have questioned how smart it is for the Navy to retain an intelligence chief with such limitations, for so long, especially at a time when the Pentagon is confronted by crises in the Middle East, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and other hotspots.

The bottom line is that any bureaucracy is going to waste money. And the bureaucrats in any department will always be tempted to care first and foremost about their salaries and benefits rather than the underlying mission.

So I’m not expecting or demanding perfection, regardless of whether the department has a worthwhile mission or (in most cases) shouldn’t even exist. But I do want constant vigilance, criticism, and budgetary pressure so that there’s at least a slightly greater chance that money won’t be squandered.

And even though I’m a fan of decentralization, that doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to the fact that state and local governments are very capable of similar behavior.

Consider, for example, the streetcar project in our Washington, DC. The main problem is that taxpayers are getting reamed. The current price tag, according to a report in the Washington Times, is about $3 billion.

And what are taxpayers getting for that “investment”?

So far, based on a story in one of the city’s other newspapers, the Washington Post, they’re getting long delays.

In the early 2000s, an ambitious band of city officials set out to cut through the bureaucratic mire and launch a vast streetcar network that would be a model for the nation, eventually running 20 to 40 miles or more. The first leg was supposed to open in 2006. But as 2015 comes to a close, officials are scrambling toward their latest goal of opening a diminished, 2.2-mile streetcar line.

But major delays are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Post‘s report highlights how one small part of the project – a maintenance facility for the streetcars – has become symbolic of grotesque cost overruns and waste.

The District is spending three or four times what other cities have to build a maintenance facility for its fledging streetcar system… The “Car Barn” project was originally designed as a simple garage and rail yard for light repairs and storage, with some offices for staff. But it has ballooned in ambition and nearly tripled in cost — to $48.8 million. It will now include a number of pricey and unusual features, including grass tracks for parking the fleet of six streetcars and a cistern for washing them with rainwater. …The District says it…is projected to open in 2017 after long delays. Tucson spent $13 million. Cincinnati’s was $11.5 million. Seattle’s came in at $11.1 million.

I’m sure local taxpayers (plus taxpayers around the nation that also subsidized this farce) will be happy to know they paid for a solar roof and other useless quirks.

Here are some of the details on why costs exploded.

…the building has…become a teaching tool for how public projects can be saddled with immense new costs. The historic designation “prompted an immediate six-month stop-work order,” DDOT said, and required, along with the green building rules, numerous upgrades. Those included using stone and brick materials; adding a saw-toothed roof with skylights; and hiding a streetcar power supply under photovoltaic cells and behind “green screen walls.” …Among the other major additions was an intricate system of turf tracks and paving stones that allow rainwater to drip into an underground vault for storage and filtering before flowing toward the city’s storm-water pipes.

Though taxpayers may think the “drip” is the sound of their money being flushed down a toilet.

In 2011, under Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), the District estimated it would spend $6.2 million on a maintenance yard and a temporary shelter — basically, a big tent. Then, with the temporary tuneup location in place, the permanent building, additional track and other work in the yard would be finished for an additional $10.7 million. …The yard-and-tent total grew to $10.4 million, DDOT said, including environmental work and hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep some Dean-Facchina workers on the job 12 hours a day, six days a week to speed things up. By last year, estimates for the second phase, including the permanent Car Barn, had risen to $24 million. In July, the city agreed to spend $38.4 million on this phase, bringing the total to $48.8 million. Among the unforeseen costs listed by DDOT are $1 million in storm drainage and $824,000 in “indirects.”

So what’s the bottom line?

Well, the late former Mayor of DC, Marion Barry, is not normally a credible source. And I’m not sure I trust any numbers that came out of his mouth.

But I suspect he ventured very close to the truth when he was quoted in a Washington Timesstory from 2014.

…the late former Mayor Marion Barry said D.C. taxpayers would be spending $2,000 to subsidize each ride, calling it “a streetcar to nowhere.”

In other words, it would have been cheaper to hire chauffeured limousines for the handful of people who will use the streetcar. Assuming, of course, it ever gets opened.

Federal spending gets more ridiculous every year, and a new congressional report details 100 of the most egregious examples. Following in the footsteps of chronic-waste chronicler Tom Coburn, Oklahoma senator James Lankford published “Federal Fumbles” late on Monday afternoon. …Here are NR’s top-ten favorite — which is to say, most scoff-worthy and absurd — examples of how the government wastes your time, energy, and hard-earned cash.

Here are some of the highlights, though lowlights might be a better term.

…the Department of Defense…approved a $283,500 grant to monitor the day-to-day life of baby gnatchatchers. …the U.S. National Institutes of Health…announced it would grant some hapless grad student $48,500 to pen the definitive history of smoking in Russia over the past 130 years. …the National Science Foundation…gave Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than $400k to ponder the burning question: “Does media choice cause polarization, or does polarization cause media choice?” …five federal agencies alone spent $3.1 billion on workers placed on administrative leave in a two-year timespan. A lot of that cash — $775 million, to be exact — went to public employees banned from their desks for more than a month. …The National Park Service forked over $5,000 to Mars Hill University so it could make a documentary film about a local musician. …$65,473 to figure out what bugs do near a lightbulb…$35,000 for solar-powered beer.

I wrote a few days ago that advocates of smaller government have won a very significant victory over the past five years, as measured by the fact that there’s been zero growth in overall federal spending.

And because the private economy has grown while the federal budget has been flat, this means that the burden of government spending – measured as a share of GDP – has declined.

But a long journey begins with a first step and the spending freeze over the past five years is worth celebrating.

And let’s also celebrate the fact that members of Congress no longer have carte blanche, generally using “appropriations” legislation, to specifically allocate spending for campaign contributors and other favored constituencies. Such spending allocations, known as “earmarks,” have been banned ever since the GOP took the House in 2010.

…earmarks are the proverbial apple in the congressional Garden of Eden. Members who otherwise might want to defend taxpayers are lured into becoming part of the problem. …earmarks [are] a “gateway drug” that “seduces members into treating the federal budget as a good thing that can be milked for home-state/district projects.” …they finance a racket featuring big payoffs to special interests, who give big fees to lobbyists (often former staffers and Members), who give big contributions to politicians. Everyone wins…except taxpayers.

You’ll notice, though, that I didn’t really offer any supporting evidence four years ago.

So it’s time to rectify that oversight. The easy evidence to cite is that the federal budget hasn’t grown over the past five years, but there are several reasons for that spending freeze.

While I think the earmark ban deserves some of the credit, let me share a couple of anecdotes that also show why it was good to end this odious version of pork-barrel spending.

Here are some excerpts from a Northern Virginia news report about the looming retirement of a member of the Appropriations Committee.

U.S. Rep. Jim Moran departs Congress unrepentant on the need for those much-maligned targeted budget items known as earmarks. Moran – who once famously, if jokingly, promised to “earmark the shit out of” the federal budget if Democrats regained control in Congress – told the annual meeting of the Inter-Service Club Council of Arlington that the spending measures that used to be inserted at the behest of individual members of Congress should be brought back.

You may be wondering why this is newsworthy. After all, it’s hardly a shock that a big spender likes earmarks.

But it’s this next excerpt that makes the key point.

Why is he leaving? At the luncheon, Moran expanded on earlier frustrations. “Congress as an institution is dysfunctional,” he said. “Life’s too short to be part of an institution that only produces frustration.” Things were different when Moran first was elected to Congress in the early 1990s.

In other words, Cong. Moran got frustrated and decided to quit (at least in part) because he no longer had the ability to play favors and raise campaign cash by doling out earmarks.

Gee, it’s almost enough to make you cry with sympathy. I’m sure taxpayers are very sad that Congressman Moran won’t be prowling the halls of Congress any longer.

And it’s a double tragedy because he won’t have as much value as a lobbyist since he can’t finagle earmarks from his former colleagues. Oh, the humanity!

And keep your hankie ready, because our next story also is a tear-jerker. It’s from before the election and it’s about outgoing Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and his refusal to share his stash of campaign cash with fellow Democrats.

Despite direct appeals from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and other top Democrats, Harkin has refused to transfer money from his $2.4 million campaign account to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, according to sources and campaign finance records.

So why did Harkin decide to hoard his campaign cash, even though he was retiring from politics?

Because the poor fellow wasn’t allowed to subsidize his own ego with a taxpayer-funded earmark and had to use money from his contributors instead.

…the retiring Iowa senator has informed party leaders that he plans to use the campaign funds for a charitable contribution to an entity that bears his name: The Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University in Des Moines, according to sources close to discussions with the senator. …the ban on congressional earmarks…has prevented him — a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee — from steering money to Drake University, said Democratic sources. Finding a home for his official papers has been a priority for Harkin, who has served in the Senate for three decades after 10 years in the House.

Gosh, no wonder Harry Reid wants to bring back earmarks. If politicians can steal from taxpayers, they’ll have more money available to win elections!

Which is another reason why the earmark ban should be preserved.

P.S. Want another argument against earmarks? Well, how about the fact that reporters at the Washington Postthink President Obama would have been able to push through more gun control if he could have used earmarks as bribes.

P.P.S. I want to switch topics and close by giving readers a riddle.

What would happen if you scrambled the genes of George W. Bush and David Cameron (the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and produced two new people, sort of like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins?

David Cameron is the opposite. I’ve groused about his disturbing affinity for tax hikes, but he’s been much better on spending than I thought he would be.

And he’s about to get even better according to Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraph.

…this government is a free marketeer’s dream. It believes in cutting spending as a share of GDP much more severely than any previous government had dreamed of. On that metric, it is more Thatcherite than Thatcher, more Reaganite than Reagan. Public spending is expected to fall to 35.2pc of GDP by 2019-20, the lowest level in at least 80 years. …When looking just at the Government’s consumption of goods and services, the state’s relative size will fall to levels last seen in 1938, according to a historical Bank of England dataset. …the aspiration is revolutionary.

Considering that government spending in the United Kingdom was consuming more than 48 percent of GDP as recently as 2009, it truly would be a dream if the burden of the public sector dropped to “only” 35 percent of economic output.

Returning to my riddle, Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly had the same genetic stock in Twins, but one of them somehow got the bad genes and the other one got the good genes.

So I’m speculating that the genes of Bush and Cameron, scrambled together, would produce one good politician who believes in lower spending and lower tax (i.e., Coolidge) and one bad politician who supports higher taxes and bigger government (i.e., Nixon).

P.P.P.S. Here are my most recent numbers showing which modern Presidents were the most frugal and most profligate.

The good news is that the American people increasingly recognize that Washington is a cesspool of waste, fraud, and abuse.

A Gallup Poll from last month, for instance, finds that folks are quite aware that a huge chunk of the federal budget is squandered.

There are two interesting takeaways from this polling data.

First, it’s good to see that there’s been a steady increase in the perception of waste in Washington. That shows people are paying more attention over time. In other words, more and more Americans recognize that the public sector isa sleazy racketfor the benefit of bureaucrats, lobbyists, contractors, politicians, cronies, interest groups, and other insiders.

Second, it’s also worth noting that there’s less waste at the state level and even less waste at the local level. These are just perceptions, to be sure, but I suspect people are right. Money is less likely to be squandered when people have a greater opportunity to see how it’s being spent. Which is why federalism is good policy and good politics.

Remember the Spending Quiz from 2010, which asked people to guess whether absurd examples of government waste were true or false?

Well, we have a new video on government waste, though bureaucrats and politicians have become so profligate it doesn’t even bother to trick people with fake examples.

While very well done, I do have two small complaints about the video.

First, it asks whether we should cut spending or raise taxes to deal with the national debt. I think that’s too narrow. We shouldn’t be wasting money even if the budget was balanced and there wasn’t a penny of debt.

Second, the video sort of acquiesces to the dishonest Washington terminology by asking whether we should cut spending or raise taxes, implying those are the only two options. I favor genuine spending cuts, of course, but the most accurate way of phrasing the question is to ask whether we should cut spending, restrain spending, or let government grow on auto-pilot.